"MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate received great feedback from the community and helped us to efficiently mature the technology to announce General Availability," said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering. "The new features and enhancements that MySQL 5.6 delivers further demonstrate Oracle's investment in driving MySQL innovation, making MySQL a fantastic fit for today's most demanding Web, Cloud and embedded application requirements."

Highlights of MySQL 5.6 include better query execution times and diagnostics provided through an enhanced MySQL Optimizer diagnostics.

The addition of Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) and Batch Key Access (BKA) can improve selected query throughput by up to 280x according to the company.

Oracle also says the new version brings greater performance throughput and application availability with an improved InnoDB storage engine, with up to 230 percent improvement in transactional and read only throughput. InnoDB has been re-factored to minimize legacy threading, flushing, and purge mutex contentions and bottlenecks, enabling better concurrency on heavily loaded OLTP systems, and resulting in significantly improved throughput for both transactional and read only workloads.

New online DDL operations enable DBAs to add indexes and perform table alterations while the application remains available for updates.

Other performance enhancements include a simple key value lookup, with flexible NoSQL access to InnoDB providing access to data via the familiar Memcached API. This means users get key-value operations and complex SQL queries in the same database.

MySQL 5.6 includes a number of additional enhancements including Geographic Information Systems for precise spatial operations, improved IPv6 compliance and optimized server defaults.